by Harvey Click
Letha was sitting in a chair beside the gurney, holding Garrick’s blue hand. Flies buzzed around the oozing flesh of his face, and the smell of death was strong.
She looked up at Mary and said, “Maybe you’d like to play doctor and give your diagnosis, everyone else has. Even his father’s ready to stick him in the ground. Hold your breath for a few seconds and the morticians come knocking on your door. I’ve been waiting to see him all these years, and the only ones having fun are the flies. But I’m going to make him walk again, and your boyfriend’s going to help.”
She smiled and sang, “Hush, little baby, walk again, Dexy’s gonna give you his bones and skin.”
She picked a drowning fly out of a pustule on Garrick’s face. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You see me sitting here like Madonna with child and you think maybe trading places won’t be so bad. But you’re wrong, because I’m not really here.”
Letha vanished in a dance of sparks, and a man wearing her dress sat and stared at the fly.
“I’ll show you where I really sit,” the man said. “I’ll show you what alone really is.”
The grapple pulled the rusty wheel along its track to the center of the room, where a trapdoor screaked open on the floor. Mary descended into damp darkness reeking of disease and mold.
“This will be your bedroom,” Letha said. “I know it’s nothing fancy.”
When Mary’s eyes adjusted she saw the circular wall of a cellar, wet stones shimmering with green phosphorescence. The floor was a narrow walkway surrounding a large cistern filled with reeking water.
“Not an ideal place to entertain a lover, but so what?” Letha said. “There won’t be any lovers.”
Her voice echoed off the walls, or maybe inside Mary’s skull. The stench was making her sick.
“Our mutual know-it-all friend claims that Cypher wants to destroy the whole human race. Tell me the truth, would you help him do that just to get out of this dreadful bedroom?”
The water stirred and belched a sickroom stink.
“Of course you would,” Letha said.
Something glowed green in the cistern. It looked like a huge ball of fungus.
“If it were up to me I’d be merciful and let you die, but Cypher wants to keep this thing alive, and he needs your feeble mind to do that.”
The spongy mass of fungus pulsated and stank as Letha spoke.
“Get used to it,” she said. “This toadstool is going to be your brain. Don’t worry, it works pretty well. I’ve been trapped inside it for almost thirty years, and I’m not senile yet.”
Mary vomited into the reeking water.
“Thanks for sharing your feelings,” Letha said, and the toadstool emitted a faint green flicker. “You’ve given me food for thought.”
***
The flies finally persuaded Letha, their diagnosis more compelling than any doctor’s. She watched three disciples strap Mary into a gurney near Garrick’s, thinking those short legs and little breasts will be all right. Then she returned to the lightless sanctuary of self and captured a spectron to negotiate with Cypher.
“If this man is dead, his soul is gone,” Cypher said.
“But there’s something you can do,” Letha said. “I saw it done in Aleppo once.”
“Yes, I can make him breathe,” he said. “Cypher can make the dust itself breathe. It’s possible he’ll even walk, depending on the state of his tissues.”
“What about his mind? Will he still know that I’m . . .” Letha almost said “his mother,” but she had never told Cypher her relationship to Garrick or Grimes. “Will he still recognize me?” she asked.
“I can restore some semblance of a mind,” Cypher said.
“And once he’s alive again, you can place his brain in a new body?” she asked.
“Of course I can. Verily I say, no greater necromancer ever walked the earth or the twisted streets of hell. But we mustn’t delay. Every minute lost is another memory rotted beyond restoration.”
“And you’ll give me a new body like you promised?” she asked.
“My word is a bond like gravity. I ask only a small fee in return.”
“I know the fee,” she said. “You want me to collect spectrons and build you an earthside doorway.”
“You’re a brainy woman,” Cypher said. “There’s another small matter. Since your son is here, I suspect his father is as well.”
Son, father—the bastard knew everything.
“Grimes is dead,” Letha said. “My men shot him last night on the lake.”
She felt Cypher probing to see if she had lied, so she didn’t dare wonder why she had. She formed a picture of Michael jerking madly in a rowboat as Hermesium bullets tore his body to shreds. The scene appealed to her, and she painted it vividly.
“Very well,” Cypher said at last. “You must put yourself into a state of fathom-seven noesis.”
“I’ve only gone to fathom-five, and that just barely,” she said.
“With Cypher all things are possible. I’ll guide you to fathom-seven and help you capture spectrons along the way. We need fourteen of them altogether. Shall we begin?”
“How does this doorway work?” she asked.
“Questions waste time, my child. Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion? My hellside portal is built of two to the power of six, and since the square root of minus two is an irrational number, we are able—”
“I don’t care about the math, I just want to know how you intend to turn my brain into a doorway,” she said. “I mean, do you plan to wipe your feet before you come marching through or what?”
“Nothing will come through but ectoplasm. It won’t damage the stinking fungus that houses your mind. Would it behoove Cypher to kill his own doorway?”
Letha remembered an old joke: “She’s nothing but a brain,” the doctor says, “and now she’s losing her mind.”
“I know you work for a demon named Zyx,” she said.
“Everyone works for a demon, but we don’t have time for gossip. Each minute we waste, another memory dies.”
“I don’t trust you,” she said.
“I’ll help you trust me. After you’ve captured seven spectrons, I’ll revive your son. Then you’ll trust me and capture the other seven, won’t you?”
“Maybe,” she said.
“Time flies, memories die. If your son’s brain deteriorates any longer, even Cypher’s art won’t help him.”
“Okay, let’s get started,” Letha said.
She sank back into the spongy folds of her toadstool brain and tried to remember how many years she’d been waiting for this day. She wondered why she was hoping that Michael would find a way to stop her.
Spectrons are everywhere and nowhere, shooting through walls and skulls as they blink in and out of existence. The trick to capturing them is to build a trap. Letha knew how to build one but didn’t know how it worked. Once Cypher had tried to explain something about electrochemical polarity and electrons spinning backwards, but she had told him to shut up. She did it by feel, a cooling and warming of a certain spot in her mind until it vacillated uncertainly between two temperatures and two tempers wavering and wanting to be filled, and then suddenly a spectron was snared, growing more energetic as it banged against the walls of its prison.
Catching another while keeping the first one in its cage was usually tricky, but with Cypher’s help the second one was simple. She felt him trying to woo her to fathom-four, a chilly place where time stretched out long and slow, and they wrestled silently for minutes or maybe hours until the third spectron danced into place. The three points gave Cypher a two-dimensional domain in her brain, a cold sheet of otherness like a purple wall separating Letha from part of her own mind.
She seemed to be sitting on a bench in a big back yard watching a bird feeder that hung from a tree. She recognized the yard; it was behind the country house in Massachusetts where she and her parents had lived after they left Gree
ce. Fathom-four had dreamed her backward in time. It was a chilly afternoon, and she sat for a very long time. Finally a tiny indigo bunting flew to the bird feeder and was trapped. The captured spectron chirped and spilled icy darkness from its cage.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Grimes sat on his bed, eyes rolled up, trying to explore the tower with his listening shells but getting nowhere. The place resembled some irrational monstrosity drawn by M. C. Escher or Giovanni Piranesi. Rooms clustered together like honeycomb cells built by drunken bees were surrounded by tangles of narrow hallways leading to spindly stairways that branched off like capillaries only to rejoin in a knot of dead ends. Spring-loaded scimitars waited to slash out from walls, rusty iron spikes hid beneath trick floor panels, poisoned needles were poised to dart from doorknobs, and barbed-wire nooses hung like cobwebs from shadowy ceilings. Dark-cowled watchmen paced or sat silently in dark alcoves with daggers dangling from their belts. Walls were shielded with Peracelsian filaments woven in strangely patterned nets that caught his telepathic probings and sent them springing back, as from a trampoline. After an hour he thought he was making some progress, but he peered into a small room and saw himself sitting on a bed with listening shells strapped to his ears.
He cursed and turned his attention to an air vent in the floor. He eased his mind through the grate to a duct that snaked sideways and down and eventually emptied into a vertical shaft wide enough for a man to rappel down its walls, but this soon splintered into a maze of tunnels housing rats and spiders. Chains dangled from pulleys in the ceilings, and a mummified corpse hung from a meat hook. Telepathy was always an eerie journey of phantom sights and sounds not fleshed out with gravity, but never before had he traveled through such an obscure riddle, more a figment than a building, as if he were exploring the convolutions of Letha’s brain. At last he found a shaft that descended into a large chamber where Bitter was strapped to a hospital gurney. Another gurney held Garrick, his tumorous skin seeping with necrotic juices.
In Damascus, Letha’s hypnotic fragrance had wooed Grimes even more than her eyes. What he smelled now was a sickening corruption of the same fragrance, like a luscious fruit liquefied by rot. He followed the stench through a trapdoor to the cellar and stared at a sprawling sponge of fungus pulsating in the cistern. So there she was, the woman he’d dreamt of countless nights. He tried to read her thoughts, but they were vague and dreamy. Three dark purple spots bruised the pale green growth, and while he watched a fourth one appeared like a dark star twinkling awake in a sickly sky. Letha was collecting spectrons.
Grimes pulled off his listening shells. It was time to make his move, while she was preoccupied. He rubbed the balls of his thumbs together, charging the slivers of lithomantic lodestone surgically embedded beneath the skin, and opened the door to the hallway. The tall disciple who had brought his food was leaning against the wall beside a kerosene lantern, and a short, pudgy partner lurked in the shadows nearby.
The tall one unsheathed his dagger. “What’s your problem?” he asked.
“Look what I did to my eye,” Grimes said.
He looked, and Grimes fixed his gaze. “Consider the sleepy comforts of Queen Mab,” he intoned while weaving a sleep-spell in the dark air with his hands. “Drawn with a team of little atomies, she gallops night by night through sentries’ brains, and then they dream of healths five fathom deep.”
The tall one’s eyelids drooped shut, and he slumped to the floor. Grimes knelt and pressed the balls of his thumbs against the boy’s temples, but before he could warm them properly the pudgy one was on top of him with a dagger. Grimes made him drop it by sending a hot blue electric jolt up the steel blade. He started yelling for help, but the yelling stopped when Grimes got a hold of his temples and gave them a good warming.
Maybe too good: blood was trickling from his nose and ears. Grimes pulled his thumbs away and cursed. He had probably melted the brain, but at least the tall disciple should still be useful.
He snatched up the dagger from the floor and threw it at another black robe racing toward him, and the man who wore it spoke his last words with a blade piercing his throat. He fell backwards and stopped talking.
Grimes listened for a long minute but heard nothing except the pudgy disciple moaning in his sleep and the tall one snoring. It felt like an insult to be guarded by only three men. He collected their daggers and cleaned the bloody one on the dead man’s robe. They were nice poniards with curved quillons, leather-wrapped hilts, and double-edged blades a foot long. Letha always had good taste.
“This is the voice of your lord and master,” he told the sleeping disciples. “From now on you’ll obey me and no one else. Wake up.”
The tall one got up slowly and rubbed his temples while the pudgy one groaned and flopped around on the floor like a fat dying fish.
“Bring Fatty into my room and undress him,” Grimes told the tall one. “Hurry up.”
Grimes dragged in the corpse himself and hid it in the bathroom. When he came out, Fatty was vomiting on the bedroom floor while the tall one stripped him.
“Give me his clothes and put him in my bed,” Grimes said.
Fatty puked and moaned, blood trickling from his eyes and ears while the tall one carried him to the bed. Grimes put on the smelly robe, strapped on the scabbard, and sheathed the dagger. The robe was too short, and his shoes were conspicuous beneath it. He took them off reluctantly and strapped on the leather sandals. Such hideous things.
“Go to the bathroom and pull down the ceiling with your dagger,” he told the tall one. “It’s soggy and should come down easily. You’ll find a sheet of wire netting above the plaster, and it’s very important to remove it intact. Don’t damage it. Understand?”
“Yes. Don’t tear the netting.”
“If you try any mischief, I’ll make your brains squirt out your ears like whipped cream,” Grimes said. “Do you understand that?”
“Yes.”
The tall one’s voice was thick and sleepy but clear. He went to the bathroom, and Grimes soon heard plaster falling. While the disciple was busy, Grimes removed the glass chimney from the kerosene lamp on the washstand, then got some coat hangers from the armoire and bent them so they would hold the lid of the serving platter upside-down like a bowl over the flame. He put the candle stub inside the bowl, and while it melted he reached into his mouth and removed a bridge of two silver molars.
He pried the false teeth open with his dagger and emptied the powdered cabiric alloy into the molten wax. He stirred the mixture with a spoon and added a touch of salt to help it bond to the Peracelsian filaments the disciple was digging out of the ceiling.
“Are you about done in there?” he called.
“Yes.” The tall one emerged with a large wad of fine wire netting.
Grimes took it and held it up by two corners like a bed sheet. It was roughly rectangular, about eight feet by ten feet.
“Is that all you could find?”
“Yes. That’s how big the ceiling is.”
Grimes dipped a corner of the netting in the molten wax. The cabiric alloy bonded instantly, just as the Philosopher had said it would. He carefully dragged the netting foot by foot through the mixture.
“You know how to get to the cellar?” he asked.
“Not yet, but I’ve learned the whole upper half and I’m ready to move lower.”
“Does anyone else up here know the way down?” Grimes asked.
“I know only what the goddess wants me to know,” the disciple said with a cocky smile. The sleepy thickness was gone from his voice, and his brown eyes looked too bright for someone who’d been touched on the temples.
Grimes held up the netting by two corners so the wax could cool. “Do you have a name?” he asked.
“John.”
“Ah yes, John, the beloved disciple.”
John smiled again, cocky and cocksure. No one smiled like that if his brain had been properly warmed, but giving him another touch would be too risk
y. Grimes needed a good navigator, not a jelly-brained zombie. At least Cocky John seemed eager to obey; following orders must come naturally to him.
Grimes cut the netting into two equal halves. He cut a round piece out of the center of each half and used shoestring to tie one of these over his head like a bonnet. Next he stuck his head through the hole in one of the large pieces so it covered his front and back like a short tunic. He folded the other two pieces carefully, wrapped them in a pillow case to protect them, and tucked the bundle inside his scabbard belt. Then he covered the pudgy disciple’s body and bloody face with a blanket so anyone checking the room might think he was Grimes.
“Don’t get up,” he said. The command was superfluous; the young man would never get up again. “Okay, John, take me as far down as you can.”
John stepped into the hallway and took the kerosene lantern from the wall. Grimes pulled his cowl over his face and followed him past shut doors and dark stairs. The narrow corridor twisted like a tunnel right, left, up and down. They came to an ascending stairway, and John started climbing.
“Wait a minute,” Grimes said. “I want to go down, not up.”
John grinned, kerosene lantern painting his pale face yellow. “The straight hallway turns round, and the up-staircase goes down,” he said.
Grimes shrugged and followed him. The tight stone stairway soon turned sharply to the left, and John stopped and chanted:
“Be wise and you’ll fool the snare
at the turn of the fifteenth stair
by pulling the second chain
and pulling it once again,
but wait till you hear the bell
or my blade will send you to hell.”
“What’s that?” Grimes asked.
“One of her clues,” John said.
He smiled smugly and tugged one of the chains hanging from the ceiling. He waited until a bell tolled inside the wall, and then tugged it once again.